I'm really curious what you mean by quest design? I can understand why someone would have an issue with the pacing of the game (I personally loved it but I think it just scratched a particular itch for me) and I can sort of agree on the handcrafted encounters (PoE2 technically did that in so far as there aren't really random encounters I don't think, but there was room to improve) but I'm not sure what BG3 did with its quest design that was radically different from PoE.
On the question of handcrafted combat encounters, I wonder if maybe those sorts of encounters are just easier to do in turn-based systems? Because Solasta I think did pretty well at that too. I think BG3 goes a bit far at times making what should be straight forward encounters more gimmicky than they need to be, but in general encounter design isn't something I have an issue with overall.
For me doing quests is really fun in BG3 but not in PoE2. The way they designed the quests and maps in BG3 means there is always something fun to do! For PoE2 it might be because I didn’t like the focus on factions, or the way they did factions, in PoE2 combined with the PoE2 main story pacing issues.
Yes, for combat it might be just that I like turnbased much better than RTwP. I also think it is much more fun to play a magic user in BG3 than PoE2. I do prefer the PoE2 system of per encounter spells, though, instead of having to rest!
